Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I asked, “Where are they taking us?”

“Fairbanks.”

“Fairbanks?” That was in the interior of Alaska, six, seven hundred kilometers from Prudhoe Bay.

Sonia shrugged. “Not my decision. It has a good hospital, I’m told. And we can be made secure there. You need to remember that the military’s response to situations like this is always to establish control. Dispersing key components isn’t a bad way to do it.”

Shelley forced a grin. “I’m a key component. Gets you right there, doesn’t it?”

Tom, freaked out, said, “Shut up, shut up. ”

The chopper landed heavily, and a trooper waved at us. Sonia ran toward the chopper, holding Tom’s hand. They ducked to avoid the still-turning blades. Shelley and John followed, and then me and Morag.

I clung to Morag’s hand firmly. “I always did want a ride in a Chinook, ever since I was a kid.”

“I know,” she said. “On any other day this would be a thrill, wouldn’t it?”

I glanced at her. Was she joking? But that was how Morag would have reacted, with dry humor. “Come on, that trooper is starting to look pissed at us.”

We sat strapped into canvas slingback seats bolted crudely to the floor. Battered, bruised, bloodied, we looked like refugees from a war zone — as we were, I guess. Six troopers rode with us. Their faces hidden by faceplates like space suit visors, they watched us, calm and alert, cradling massive weapons.

We took off with an unceremonious lurch. It was true that I had always wanted to fly in a Chinook. It was a design so good it had been flying since before I was born, and was still in operation now, all over the world. But the interior of that old bird was hideously uncomfortable, a roar of noise.

From the air the sight of the rig was spectacular. We saw it through the open door of the Chinook’s cargo bay. The rig’s heart had been torn out by the Higgs-field suicide bomb, leaving a hollow tangle of rusted metal that stood precariously on bent stilts. Whatever there was left to burn was doing so, fitfully. Choppers, planes, and drones buzzed around the rig like flies, and launches skirted it nervously. Away from the rig the sea seemed to be boiling, with immense slow-moving bubbles of gas breaking the surface. The gas was methane, of course, escaping from the hydrate deposits we had meant to stabilize, but had only succeeded in breaking apart. But at least the flares that had ignited in the first moments after the detonation seemed to have burned themselves out.

The chopper slid away from the coast and swept south, heading inland toward Fairbanks, and I could see no more.

Sonia seemed to have run out of the adrenaline that had brought her so far. She was bent over her damaged arm now, grimacing with pain. I wondered if one of the troopers could give her a morphine shot or somesuch, but Sonia was capable of asking for that herself if she wanted it.

Tom, John, and I were locked in a tense silence. We avoided each other’s eyes. John just sat there with his hands clasped, staring at the floor. Morag herself sat, eyes wide, mouth a small bud, her expression unreadable. I wondered if she was going through some kind of shock, too. After all what greater trauma could there be than to be reincarnated?

As for me I felt utterly dislocated, battered by the blast we had lived through, and now suspended in midair in this antique military vehicle, with my dead wife at my side. I couldn’t have guessed even an hour before that the logic of my life would bring me to this situation, here and now, with everything turned upside down.

Shelley said at last, “I wonder what happened to our moles.”

I imagined all those moles burrowing in the dark, plaintively listening for each other with their fine acoustic, electromagnetic, and seismometric senses. Mostly they would have survived; they were surely far enough away from the detonation. “They are probably fine,” I said. “They’ll find each other. They’ll know something has gone wrong, and will go dormant.”

“Yes. But they’ll be frightened.”

John raised his eyebrows. But Shelley wasn’t being anthropomorphic; you had to think about the mental state of your sentient engineering. I said, “We’ll get them back.”

Sonia said, “So we did more harm than good in the end.”

“We’ll fix it,” I said. I surprised myself by my firmness. “We have to. The issue of the hydrates hasn’t gone away, no matter what happened today.”

Shelley said, “But Ruud Makaay is dead. So is Barnette.”

“We’ll just have to fill Ruud’s shoes,” I said. “And, to be blunt, maybe we can leverage Barnette’s death to help us.”

“You think that will work?”

“I bet it’s what she would have wanted.”

John raised his head. After all we had been through, even a bomb blast, his mouth, where I had hit him, was still leaking blood. “That doesn’t sound like you, Michael.”

“Maybe I’m not the same person I was a couple of hours ago,” I snapped back at him. “Things sure don’t feel the same to me. How about you?”

He risked a glance at Morag. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to deal with this situation.”

“Then shut the fuck up,” I said.

He dropped his head again.

One of the troopers took a message from the Chinook’s pilot. The mass distribution was all wrong, she told us; the pilot was actually worried we might have a stowaway. So we were all searched, and the troopers combed the hold.

It turned out to be Morag. Her actual mass far outweighed the Chinook’s systems’ estimates, which were based on her external appearance.

The troopers looked at Morag, and at each other, and shrugged. We flew on.

We landed at Fairbanks International Airport. We clambered out of the Chinook while more choppers, military, police, and coast guard swooped out of the sky, and ambulances and military vehicles bustled on the ground.

Our trooper escort tried to hustle all of us into a military lorry, a heavy-duty armored job that stank of gasoline; the military had held on to the raw power of gas. Tom made a fuss about Sonia’s damaged arm, and demanded an ambulance. But Sonia herself brushed that aside, and we all got in the back of the truck.

Under escort, we were whisked away from the airport, and raced along a straight drag called Airport Way. We turned off before we reached Fairbanks’s downtown, such as it was, and pulled into the Memorial Hospital, where still more troops had gathered to meet us. I had to admire the speed with which all these resources had been mobilized.

Inside the hospital a serious young army officer told us we were to be treated for our injuries, and then interrogated about what had happened out at Prudhoe. He didn’t say anything about our legal status or our rights. John made some noises about legal representation, and he gave the officer some contacts he wanted called. But I already had the sense of being trapped in a vast, inhuman process that wouldn’t let up until I was spat out the other end, drained of any useful information — and hopefully cleared of suspicion.

We were to be separated, we were told, to be examined individually. But I wasn’t going to let Morag go. It wasn’t just my personal feelings; the situation seemed far too strange to allow it. At first the army officer wasn’t having any of it. But I pulled rank. I was a senior figure on the Refrigerator project, after all, and John weighed in with some support; he was always good at that stuff.

So while the others were taken away individually Morag and I were allowed to stay together, although our guard complement was doubled.

We were led to an examination room, where we were attended by a bewildered-looking doctor, a couple of nurses, another army officer, and a black-suited FBI agent from the local field office in Fairbanks. The doctor briskly put us through some medical checks. I was treated for cuts, bruises, a bang on the back of the head. My breathing had taken a battering, my chest crushed, and my lungs filled with smoke; they made me suck down pure oxygen for a while. Otherwise I was unharmed. Then I was put through more checks that had little to do with my health. My blood and DNA were sampled; I was X-rayed; all my implants were interrogated; I was even put through a full body scanner. I expected it all and endured it.